The Apple Store experience is a rather delightfully simple affair, once you get past all of the smug sniffing of the skulking, self-proclaimed Geniuses. Let’s say you enter an Apple Store, looking for a new iMac. All you need to do is walk over to one, pick up the box, flag down an employee and present your credit card. From their holster emerges a PDA: your credit card is quickly scanned, and you are on your way, without ever once having to walk up to a register.

In some ways, it’s one of the most immediate and noticeable ways in which the Apple Store “thinks different” from the likes of Best Buy. But the process is also something of a paradox and embarrassment for Apple itself: like a Best Buy, Apple rings you up in their official retail outlets using Windows software.

Yup. Every time you buy something from an Apple store, your credit card is scanned using the Windows-based EasyPay system, running on PocketPC sporting Windows Mobile. But now, that’s all set to change: according to Apple Insider, Apple will be rolling out new EasyPay terminals, based on the iPod Touch hardware combined with a credit card reader and barcode scanner.

“These things look really cool, much smaller than the Windows-based ones and faster too. They seem to be running a trial at that store, Palo [Alto] did not have them,” their tipster said.

Will this matter to the end consumer? Not a jot. But it’ll certainly relieve Apple to no longer be so integrally obliged to the technology of their biggest competitor to earn their money.